


Harry Potter and the Garden of Forking Paths

by axaxaxasmlo



Category: Ficciones - J. L. Borges, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 10:15:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19227103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axaxaxasmlo/pseuds/axaxaxasmlo





	Harry Potter and the Garden of Forking Paths

_ "So, when the prophecy says that I'll have 'power the Dark Lord knows not,' it just means -- love?" asked Harry, feeling a little let down. _

Dumbledore removed his purple hat, embroidered with shooting stars and comets, stared into it for an uncomfortably long moment, and then closed his eyes. When he opened them again, after another interval long enough that it clearly did not portend good news, Harry was shocked to see tears in his eyes.

“No,” said Dumbledore, lifting his eyes up from his hat to meet Harry’s. “I would give all I had in this world for the power you have that the Dark Lord knows not to be love. Alas, it is another power that you must wield to defeat Voldemort.” 

The clocks and chimes and innumerable instruments that cluttered Dumbledore’s office whizzed and whirred, seemingly oblivious to the drama. Not all the occupants of the office shared their insouciance, though. Harry couldn’t help but notice a few of the portraits on the walls were shooting furious glares at the Headmaster. One of them threw a handkerchief over her face when she noticed Harry looking her way, muttering something incomprehensible and leaving the frame. It was not altogether encouraging.

“Erm, Professor?” asked Harry. Dumbledore had returned his gaze to the innards of his hat and was pondering it with what appeared to be deep and abiding care, as if something small and precious lay inside. “The, ah, power. Naturally I don’t mean to pry, but if it’s not love . . .” 

“Reality,” said Dumbledore, and with a snap of his fingers his hat was back on his head. There was a coldness all about him that Harry hadn’t seen before. “You will tear the shimmering fabric of reality. You will consort with mystics and clairvoyants. You will treat with the arcane sages of bright-bannered Tlon, and summon forth transparent tigers and towers of blood.”

As far as Voldemort-vanquishing strategies went, this sounded much more promising than the power of love. Harry figured there was a catch, though. With Dumbledore, and frankly with magic in general, there almost always was. 

“How exactly does one rend the shimmering fabric of reality, Professor?” asked Harry. “Flitwick hasn’t gotten to that bit in Charms yet.”

That won a snort from Dumbledore, and the twinkle returned to his eyes for just a moment. He motioned Harry over to the tea table in the corner, plopped himself into an overstuffed armchair, and with a brief mutter at the ceiling, scones and a piping-hot teapot appeared. 

“It is your survival of the Killing Curse, Harry,” said Dumbledore, as he stirred a truly disgusting amount of sugar into his tea, “that allows you to part the veil of reality and allows you to gaze into the swirling vortex of the unreal. None have this power save you.”

“Wicked,” Harry said, in almost a whisper.

“It is wicked indeed, though I fear not in the way you imagine,” Dumbledore said. He took a bite of a raspberry scone with one hand, brushed crumbs from his chartreuse robes with the other, and mumbled an incantation to keep his teacup levitating in the meantime. 

“How will I - I mean we - I mean, how does this help us defeat Voldemort, though?” asked Harry. “What makes him vulnerable to the, um, swirling vortex of the unreal?”

“Voldemort is immortal, Harry,” said Dumbledore, in the same tone of voice he might have used to  tell Harry that his robes were on backwards. A part of Harry, a very large part to be honest, wanted to close his eyes and scream loudly and incoherently for a long time. He somehow suppressed it, as well as the growing urge to panic and toss himself from the nearest window, instead looking at Dumbledore with his best why-didn’t-you-tell-me-this-a-long-time-ago look.

“That’s not ideal.”

“Quite so.”

“And yet I gather that we’re not doomed.”

“Not exactly,” Dumbledore said. “Voldemort is immortal, true, but that does not mean he cannot be killed.”

“It doesn’t?” asked Harry. “I’d thought the whole not-dying bit was the entire point of immortality.”

Dumbledore put down his empty teacup. “Neither you, Harry, nor I, nor anyone else on this world can truly vanquish Voldemort,” he said. “He can be beaten, forced from his body, as when his Killing Curse rebounded from you and struck him those many years ago, but he will always return.” He paused, as if to consider his next words. “But if nothing from this world can defeat him, then we must simply call on the assistance of another world.”

This was all too confusing and enigmatic and theoretical for Harry’s taste. “So,” he began, “he’s not immune to people, or aliens, or whatever, from other worlds? But he’s invulnerable to anything from this world? How does that work?” 

Fawkes trilled a cry of welcome as it flew in through the window. It sat down on the arm of Harry’s chair and shamelessly begged for scones, giving him a meaningful look and a coo that, in Phoenix, no doubt meant something along the lines of, “You’d be dead if it weren’t for me, buddy.” 

“Magic allows us to bend the laws of reality, Harry,” said Dumbledore with a wave of his hand, “but they cannot be broken. By us, that is. For the entities that I speak of, reality is merely an illusion, albeit an immensely amusing one. Were they willing to help us, they would treat Voldemort in the same manner as a small dog does a chew toy.”

“And they’re willing to help us?” warred with “Who are they?” in Harry’s mind, and since he couldn’t decide which question to ask first, he settled for blurting them both out simultaneously.

“Beg pardon?” Dumbledore asked, with a small frown, pretending not to notice that Fawkes was in the midst of demolishing the last scone. Harry took a breath and restated his two questions, one by one this time.

“Will they help us? I do not know,” admitted Dumbledore, shrugging his shoulders. Fawkes belched loudly, earning him a reproving look and a disdainful sniff from the headmaster. “I sincerely hope, Harry,” he continued, “that you and I will find in ourselves the words we need to persuade them. I can scarcely imagine the consequences if we fail.”

All these years he’d been waiting for Dumbledore to level with him, thought Harry, and now that the professor finally had opened the door and let him in, all Harry wanted do do was curl up in his pillow and whimper softly about how unfair life was. “That doesn’t sound terribly reassuring, Professor,” was all he could muster.

“If the task were easy, my dear boy,” said Dumbledore, “anyone could do it.” They sat there for a minute, each lost in his own thoughts, until Fawkes whined and farted. The stench was appalling. Fawkes had the good grace to look quite embarrassed. He whickered an apology and flew to his perch behind Dumbledore’s chair. Harry tried not to gag.

“The consequences of overindulgence are seldom fragrant,” Dumbledore observed, as he waved his hand and muttered a brief incantation. Suddenly, the air smelled like waffles. The headmaster looked a bit put out. 

“That was supposed to be jasmine,” he mumbled, looking at the ceiling as if it owed him an explanation. “But where was I? Ah, yes, who are our interlocutors from beyond time and space? Now that, Harry, is a story that I will be happy to share with you. It is a long story, as most good ones are, and it starts in Argentina a very long time ago . . .”

Harry arranged himself in the armchair, took a gulp of tea, and settled in. Nothing for it but to listen and try not to fall asleep, he thought. He’d have to try to remember as much of the story as he could, or Hermione would never forgive him, and indeed would almost certainly invent a horrible curse with his name on it.

  
_ “I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia,” _ Dumbledore began.


End file.
